That led to an unprecedented 56 days of violent civil unrest, proving that rugby isn't just a game, and sport isn't just an innocent pastime. Arguably it contributed to the downfall of the apartheid regime, and a new awareness of Maori rights in this country.
Entertainment can't be innocent either. When a pop star chooses to visit a bitterly divided country one half is bound to read it as an endorsement of its cause, and the other as a snub. Donald Trump made matters worse for her by acknowledging Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, as Israel's capital.
Who would want to hang out in the new American Embassy there when it opens? How would he expect the Palestinians to react?
But politics is a long game, unlike the popularity span of a young pop star who should never have been booked there in the first place.
Lorde was one issue, but the whole country was dragged into the controversy when a Jewish group took a full-page ad in The Washington Post on New Year's Eve accusing her of bigotry, and us of prejudice against Israel for voting with most countries at the UN against Trump's decision.
The argument in the ad was crude, but I think the text maybe had a point when it claimed there was a "growing prejudice against the Jewish State" in New Zealand "trickling down to its youth".
It's happening in Europe with the rise of right-wing politics there. World War II was a long time ago, and the muddled politics that created Israel in the aftermath of the genocide of Europe's Jews may be harder to follow than the Palestinian cause.
Backing the side that wants to eliminate Israel entirely seems to be correct thinking among left-wing people now, an easy enough stance to take, but what then?
Lorde doesn't know. I don't know. Nobody does, though another atrocity would seem inevitable.
Jews were more in evidence when I was young and, with them, their backstory.
I was taught by a Jewish cellist as a child, and I had a Jewish dentist, a plump little man with a thick accent who struggled to remove my back molars so my wisdom teeth could come through.
He had a grimly humorous cartoon of a dentist at work in his waiting room that always made me nervous. Later I had a Jewish doctor and was at school with, and friends with, many more Jewish people, but it seems absurd to define people in such a limited way.
A classmate I'm thinking of was attractive, a prefect, well liked, clever, a model pupil who was bound to get a good degree and a good job. She wasn't a personal friend of mine, but no-one could have disliked her.
The Arab-Israeli Six-Day War happened in 1967, when Israel soundly defeated Egypt, Jordan and Syria with daring air strikes, capturing territory that has been disputed ever since.
Afterwards, young people from around the world went to join the Israeli kibbutz movement, working for free in their holidays, and she was among them. Such was the fashionable impulse of the time.
From what I remember being told she had a cousin there and got on well with him. I also heard he had killed himself. Then she, too, committed suicide.
No-one could make sense of it, but maybe that's the point. If I put myself in her shoes, with parents who had somehow escaped the Holocaust, then seen what it took to defend the fledgeling Jewish state, I might have despaired too. But so might the Palestinians despair.
My wish for the year ahead, then, is an impossible dream, that Israel and Palestine would find a peaceful outcome to their long-standing violence.
More realistically, I would like for Lorde to be untainted by politics, allowed to be a butterfly while she still can.
